This is the text of the second issue of Mina, an NFT art magazine on the Tezos blockchain, that required the most strength from me to write.

It talks about the photobook released by Brazilian visual artist Julia Pupim, which depicts the last months of life of her mother, who passed away in 2020.

The artist followed her mother's terminal illness and gathered the photographic records in the book "I Die and I Cannot Mourn Up My Body", released by the independent publishing house Selo Turvo, at the end of 2021.

When I bought your book late last year, it stirred me in profound ways, turning my own emotions upside down. Since then I felt that I needed to tell Julia's story in some way to more people, because this exquisite work needed to be seen by more people.

Below is the text made from the interview with the artist in its entirety, and also the pages of the magazine.
All the images were taken by Julia Pupim.

Transforming pain into art

In many beliefs, mourning, as well as death itself, is still a taboo subject. Experiencing a suffering that cannot be described by those who have never experienced the pain of losing someone very close is still far from being an easy subject to approach or, more than that, to document through photography.

Reflections on human attitudes toward death don’t usually leave the confines of the offices of mental health professionals. But the need to talk about mourning for those who live the pain in their own flesh can become a vital issue for the management of their own sanity and survival.

So in a natural and unplanned way, visual artist Julia Pupim, 26, who lives in Campinas (Brazil), felt the urge to document the last months of her mother's life during the pandemic. The record culminated in the photobook "I Die and I Cannot Mourn My Body", released by the independent publishing house Selo Turvo, in late 2021.

In 2020, prevented from going out to photograph by the quarantine imposed by health authorities, Julia found herself in the midst of a creative inflorescence. As I wasn’t going out, I started to take many self-portraits and to document my daily life with my mother. Then in the middle of 2020 she got sick and I continued to record everything."

But it was only after her mother's death that the artist felt the need to do something with the photos, and so she assembled the first draft from her photobook. "I fell in love with the possibility of creating these narratives through editing, and today I don't see myself creating something that is completely distant from my experiences," she says.

According to Julia, there was no exact moment when she decided to turn her records into a book. "It just ended up happening. I had already been recording the daily moments at home, and when my mother got sick I just gave continuity. The texts (Julia also started using her Instagram account to write stories of her experiences during her mother's illness and mourning) started as an attempt to communicate, as if she could listen to me through them. My mother spent her last months of life unconscious, so by externalizing my feelings and thoughts I felt that somehow it could reach her. I talked to her in the hospital, but often in the most intimate and painful moments I was at home, which is when I wrote. And then making it public gained strength," she said.

"[...]
I visited her grave. very strange the feeling of facing that you are, in fact, there. and that we put you inside a coffin and inside a hole. and that you will stay there forever. i imagine your body crumbling little by little, i believe that now you are just a skeleton. crazy how all life happens and ends like this. for everyone. death is the only moment that changes everything. the only thing that has no return or solution"

[...]
"my grandma wanted me to participate in all the rituals, to have the final word on everything. rituals that made no sense to me, never did. i chose the clothes that buried you. the coffin, the flowers. i chose the material of the tomb and the plastic flower arrangement to leave on it. what difference does it make if I sleep until noon? what difference does it make if I pay attention while driving alone? what difference does it make if I dedicate myself to anything? what difference does it make to be here?"

Julia wrote the above passages to caption the images in which she appears digging a hole in the earth and burying herself up to her head. More than a self-portrait, the photoperformance is a type of photography that she intends to continue investigating in the future.

The artist says that the idea of creating a photographic book about such an intimate moment gained weight after her mother's death: "Initially it was something for us, a way to honor her, to give her a present, I never thought it would actually become a book and be published. I ended up being selected by the Turvo Stamp to transform this project into a photobook and that’s when everything changed. Until today I can still imagine her receiving this gift, I can see her face and hear her voice. I think she would love it.

Julia found some challenges in the production of the book, like separating the "daughter" from the "artist" to be able to produce such striking images, and also facing some prejudice from other family members.

"I had never talked about it before, but they were pretty conflicting feelings. I often looked at myself from the outside and was afraid of looking cold and insensitive. I think some family members had a little bit of that look, like who’s asking why I am recording these moments. I think people are not used to recording pain, it makes us vulnerable, so we hide it and share only what makes us happy, our good moments," she says.

The artist says she has always had an easy time sharing personal things, but in recent years it has been a conscious choice to try to be more truthful about my feelings and to lose the fear of sharing them. "After all, everyone feels," she says.

According to Julia, that moment consumed her life completely and for a period she tried to pretend that everything was under control, but she couldn't sustain it for long. "That's when I decided to start sharing. That was my truth at the moment and I wanted to be able to talk openly about it. These were conscious decisions, but still many times when I shared some text, the urge was to delete and go back. It is difficult to show vulnerability and the other's look turned into a double-edged sword: at the same time that I felt I needed it to validate my feelings, so that it would reach my mother, I was afraid of appearing insensitive and opportunistic to this pain.

In her book, one of the most impressive pictures is of her mother in her coffin, being woken up. "I decided on the day of the wake that I would document it, but it was a little difficult to take the picture, I felt quite judged by the older people. What helped me was that I had already understood that everyone experiences grief in their own way and that was mine. So I tried not to let anyone spoil this moment that was ours, this farewell. Only I know what I experienced and how important it was in some way.

Other striking images in Julia's book are of an elderly neighbor who daily fed black birds in her backyard. "Everything about her intrigued me, the back of the house that seemed kind of abandoned, the fact that she was always alone, her dark clothes. I only saw her at feeding time, but what intrigued me the most was her devotion to feeding the birds every day. And that they were waiting for her. It was beautiful to see all this ritual, this movement. I felt hidden, observing an almost intimate relationship, where it seemed I shouldn't be there. Almost as if I had discovered a secret. I think I observed her for about six months, with some time gaps," says Júlia.

For the artist, her book had two objectives: to bring closer the theme of mourning, which is very little touched in our society, and to provide some identification for people who also went through the loss of a loved one.

"One of the most comforting things about my process was talking to people who had already gone through similar situations. Grief is a lonely process, you get this feeling that it doesn't matter much to share these common experiences, because only you are feeling this grief, only you know what relationship died there. And in a way it is true, because you deal with these feelings alone, but I realized that sharing was important when I talked to a friend who had lost his father and said that he also felt alone like that.

"We have an idea of what it's going to be like to experience grief, from movies, books, and then it happens and it's completely different. And I kept asking myself if it was normal what I was feeling, if it was normal this inconstancy and variation of feelings. So these reflections are very important to me and I would really like people to identify and feel less lonely in this experience, but also to remember their loved ones with love. I also wanted those who have not experienced grief to know a little bit about how death is part of life. I think that if we treated death as something more natural, maybe it would be less painful to deal with these moments."

To produce the book, Julia says she was greatly inspired by the work of Cuban sculptor Ana Mendieta. In her life, artists such as the photographer Daido Moriyama and the painter Leonilson are frequent inspirations. Among her future projects is the book "Burn after reading", where Julia intends to talk about another taboo subject, abortion. "The idea is to tell a secret so intimate that you have to burn the book after reading it, not literally, of course. I don't know yet if it will be a zine or a photobook, but the project is already in progress."

About Mina

Mina is a monthly magazine minted on the Tezos blockchain. If you are a collector of NFTs, you can support our project by collecting an issue on the Teia community site.

If you are not a collector, but are a photography enthusiast and would like to follow the magazine more closely, you can join us on our social networks, on Twitter and Instagram.